Rock River Valley Insider: Form + function = good architecture

Have you ever worked in a dingy building where you spent half your time finding the parts and space you needed to do your job?

That’s bad architecture, inside and out.

Contrast that to an attractive workplace, landscaping and all, with clean, well-lit interior spaces that enable you to be efficient at whatever you’re producing for a paycheck.

That’s successful architecture. When we have it, we don’t think about it.

Architecture affects what we see and how we feel daily. You were probably in a space today designed by an architect. Maybe it was your office building, a business you visited, a school, church or hospital. Maybe it was your house.

“Our entire lives are impacted by built environments and often the public takes that for granted,” said John Saunders, an architect with Larson & Darby Group in Rockford.

“That’s good in some respects. The built environment should not interfere in our lives but support us and the way we function.”

Or, as Lynn Belles of Belles Firm of Architecture puts it, architecture “can make you feel good or not so good about where you are.”

How architects do that ultimately determines the way our city looks.

In 1930 when the Rockford Register Star News Tower was built, it was said that architect Jesse Barloga defined “Rockford’s skyline.” The tower still is part of our look, but other buildings on either side of the river play a role, too.

Architecture doesn’t just apply to city centers. The new SwedishAmerican Regional Cancer Center on Bell School Road near Interstate 90 is a new “gateway” to the city, said Daniel Saavedra whose firm, Saavedra Gehlhausen, designed the structure.

Architects and SwedishAmerican wanted the building to be a statement about the hospital and the city.

“When people see this building, they will see that Rockford is moving ahead as a community, that it respects the site in which the building is placed and the environmental relationship of the landscape and the building,” he said.

Rockford, a traditional city architecturally, has seen a move in the past decade toward contemporary building styles, Saavedra said. Rock Valley College has several examples of that — its remodeled Physical Education Center, the Karl Jacobs Center for Science and Math and the oft-praised Starlight Theatre designed by Studio Gang Architects of Chicago, led by Jeanne Gang of Belvidere.

The University of Illinois College of Medicine’s new National Center for Rural Health, designed by Larson & Darby, gives the school and the city a new landmark; Saunders cites it as one of the firm’s great successes. Asked to identify a few others, he pointed to the Danfoss manufacturing and office plant in Loves Park and the DeKalb County Farm Bureau in Sycamore.

Page 2 of 2 - The Fisher Memorial Chapel and the Blanche Walker Burpee Center at Rockford University are two more college campus architectural successes, said Belles, an architectural designer who, with her architect husband, Rob, runs Belles Architecture.

Lynn Belles likes one-of-a-kind local architecture, like the News Tower. There are many other examples of unique, local design, she said, including restaurants J.M.K. Nippon and Francesco’s.

Rob Belles called the new federal courthouse downtown a handsome building: “It’s a thoroughly modern building, well-massed, with everything in proportion. It’s got height but doesn’t appear tall and skinny. It’s not heavy but is a pretty big building, with effective use of glass and solid materials.”

Everyone should take a walk inside the federal building to appreciate it, Belles added.